Where to Place Keywords (SEO)

DataMouse — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:16:24 +0000

Any SEO firm will tell you that keyword research and identification is a major factor in their optimization strategies; that much is a no brainer. But knowing where to place those keywords can be a little trickier. Here are some tips you can use to help you know where to place keywords and phrases in your webpage:

Title Tags:
The title tag is a great place to add your targeted keywords. The text inside the title tag displays as your page’s title in the search engines’ results. The title tag should be no more than 6 or 7 words, with the keywords appearing at the beginning of the tag. If your title is any longer, the level of Keyword Density drops (so the words become less important to the SERPS).

Anchor Text:
Anchor text links are ranked as very valuable to search engines, so plenty of them should be in your web pages. The most powerful anchor texts of all are those whose text contains targeted keywords. Each click on an inbound keyword anchor link will count as a vote of that keyword to a search engine’s rankings. There’s a whole article on Anchor Text Optimisation available in the archives.

Heading Tags:
Adding keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3) is as beneficial as putting them in the page title. Do not use words like “and”, “for”, “the”, etc. as they are ignored by search engine spiders. Try to make best possible use of this place in your website.

URL:
Including targeted keywords in your website’s URL is helpful from an SEO perspective. Also be sure to use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URL to separate text. As with title tags, the more words you have, the less “strength” or weight they will have with the search engines.

Meta Tags:
Although Meta tags are no longer recognized by Google, they are still helpful for other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. If you are optimizing for other search engines, it’s a good idea to place some keywords in Meta tags. If you would like to read more on meta tags, there’s a list of meta tags and also an article on the myths of SEO and meta tags.

Alt Tags:
Search engine spiders are unable to read images or graphics. If you have images in your web pages, then make sure to include several top targeted keywords in the ALT tags. Be careful not to “stuff” the alt tags with too many keywords, however, or your rankings could be dropped.

Website Body:
Strategically “sprinkling” keywords throughout the body of your website is ideal. All pages should contain at least the top 2 keywords that you are targeting, and all articles and other content should be peppered with various targeted keywords as much as possible. Also note that the closer to the top of your page, the moreweight the search engines will add to them.

Using this short list to help you with your keyword placements will surely benefit your search engine rankings.

Meta Tags: The Myths and SEO (i) – The Title Tag

DataMouse — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:58:14 +0000

Technically speaking, the title tag is not a meta tag. (It is also not actually a tag, but an element). However, as it is inserted into the same section of your code and is very important, I have decided to include it in the article.

Indeed, it is the single most important element on your web page – bar none.

The title tag controls the text that will appear in the top of your browser and, if you’re using a tabbed browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, the text in your tabs. It also forms the anchor text for your site hyperlink in the SERPs. It does not appear anywhere else on your web pages.

Users of a search engine will click on the hyperlink to visit your site; so you can see how important it is to human visitors browsing SERPs to have a title that is intelligible, short and punchy. Also, search engines themselves will gather information about your site from the title tag, too.

Using the tag is very simple, and the syntax is as follows:

Meta tags and SEO

Writing a Title Tag

As search engines use the title tag to identify your site, it is vitally important that we understand how to write a title that works to our benefit, rather than our detriment.

Take this title, for example:

YouShop.com has loads of great products and free downloads. Check us out

Although this is informative and written in a natural language, the search engines loathe this. Google will only read about the first 90 characters of your title and assigns a weight to each of the words based on the keyword density of the title.

In this example, we have 12 words. If the most important words for us are “free”, “downloads” and “products”, Google will assign a weighting of 1/12, as each word appears just once out of the 12 words in the title.

We can shrink the erroneous words out of the title by using the “|” symbol and lose the last part of the title, which serves no purpose:

YouShop.com | Loads of great products | Free downloads

Already, this is looking more attractive to our search engines. However, there’s more to do.

Not only do search engines concentrate on word density; they also assign weight based on where the word appears. As most languages read from left-to-right, Google assigns the most weight to the first word in the sentence and the least to the last.

If you want to optimise your keyword “YouShop.com”, this is a good thing. If not, we need to rework our title some more and decide which is the most important word(s) for this page.

At this point, you should also be aware that search engines will also look at the other page titles in your site. If they’re all the same, then this will also damage the level of weight that they assign.

With this in mind, we could create a different title for two different pages:

Free Downloads | YouShop.com

and

Great Products | YouShop.com

This has a few benefits:

There are few words, so the keyword density is much richer
Search engines will weight pages differently, which helps PageRank (in the case of Google) be assigned to internal we pages
The text is short and informative for human SERPs visitors

This last point is vitally important. Although we are optimising for search engines, it is people that will eventually click through from the search engine. Remember, your title element is the very first thing that the visitor will see, make sure it leaves a clicking impression.

Title Tag Myths

As we’ve already discussed, search engines will weight words based on position and on their density in the title phrase. If you observe these two things, many of the myths around the title also disappear.

Spamming your title reduces the density and, therefore, the importance that Google deems it has. This statement was optimised for the search terms “bags” and “bag”:

Sports bags, hand bag, gym bags, cheap bag, canvas bags, shoulder bags

As you can see, the title:

Makes no immediately readable sense to human visitors clicking through from search engines
Dilutes the effectiveness of both “bag” and “bags” keywords*
Identifies “bag” as being only the fourth most important word in the title

It would be far better to have separate pages for each genre of bag and individually optimise that area of bags.

* Google is currently experimenting with “stemming”. This will, hopefully, enable the search engine to identify both plural and singular versions of the same word.

Other Title Myths

“Search engines are case sensitive, so I have to write my words in multiple cases” (i.e. “bag”, “Bag”, “BAG” etc)

False. Most search engines are not case sensitive, so you can write your title tag in a way that looks most visually appealing. Remember, there’s a person at the end of the search.

“Using only keywords gets me a better result”

False. Although it may get you an initially better search engine result, the number of clicks through to your site will not be as positive if your title is incoherent.

As well as being the anchor text in the search engine, the title tag usually appears as the text when you ‘bookmark’ or add a page to your ‘favourites’ list. Therefore, it should make sense when a person reads it later.

“I change my title every few days and I get better results.”

False. Constantly changing your title will have no effect on the ranking of your site as the crawl rate and changes in the search engines can take time.

If you have a page that’s doing well, leave it be. Let it slip down to page 2. Even then, be real careful about the changes you make. Usually a small change is all that is needed to bump it back into place. You may even want to look at adding a second keyword if it already isn’t there.

I hope that you found this article useful. More tags will follow shortly. Next up is the meta description tag.

DataMouse.biz Blog » Title Tags

Where to Place Keywords (SEO)

Meta Tags: The Myths and SEO (i) – The Title Tag